CultureHack, Tumbled

American critics complain that his characters are crash-test dummies; that his books are plotless film loops, obsessive-compulsive meditations on the pathologies of everyday life in postmodernity. Ballard’s point exactly, as he writes in his incomparable introduction to the French edition of Crash (a virtual graduate seminar in a few pages, richer in insights into the postmodern condition than all of Lyotard’s books laid end to end):

“The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century—-sex and paranoia. […] Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.

”[…] Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th-century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathology? […]

“I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—-mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.”

HOLD THE COPROPHAGIA

They’d run with that tallness, employing a white, custom-printed wallpaper, decorated with ornate cartouches in glossy black. These were comprised, if you looked more closely, of enlarged bits of anatomical drawings of bugs. Scimitar mandibles, spiky elongated limbs, the delicate wings (she imagined) of mayflies. The two largest pieces of furniture in the room were the bed, its massive frame covered entirely with slabs of scrimshawed walrus ivory, with the enormous, somehow ecclesiastic-looking lower jawbone of a right whale fastened to the wall at its head, and a birdcage, so large she might have crouched in it herself, suspended from the ceiling. The cage was stacked with books, and fitted, inside, with minimalist Swiss halogen fixtures, each tiny bulb focused on one or another of Number Four’s many artifacts. And not just prop books, Inchmale had proudly pointed out. Fiction or non, they all seemed to be about England, and so far she had read parts of Dame Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics and most of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male.

She took off her coat, hung it on a stuffed, satin-covered hanger in the wardrobe, and sat on the edge of the bed to remove her shoes. The Piblokto Madness Bed, Inchmale called it. “Intense hysteria,” she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivy to cold, echolalia.” She kicked her shoes in the direction of the wardrobe’s open door. “Hold the coprophagia,’ she added.

I discovered science fiction magazines in this Greyhound station. Or rather, in 1961, I discovered that science fiction magazines were still being published. I’d found a moldering stack of 1950s Galaxy a year or so earlier, but had assumed that this was a dead platform, an extinct form of publishing. At Puckett’s Greyhound Cafeteria I discovered Amazing Stories, and Fantastic, both still quite wonderfully alive. At that time, there were separate toilets for blacks (“colored people”) in this bus station. Later, there weren’t, and the colored men’s toilet, a room I’d never entered, had its door and its fixtures removed, and became an alcove for a somewhat expanded selection of magazines and paperbacks.

How strange. That door I walked past, so many times, and never entered. That whole world of aparthied that I, a white kid in the south, had so little idea of, because it *was* the world, then, there. Though already not entirely the world of science fiction, or anyway not the world of the science fiction I was starting to be able to recognize as the science fiction I needed. Signals from outside. O sweet subversion. Thank you, Fritz Leiber, Samuel R Delany, J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock. Thank you for many things, but tonight thank you most for having, in your different ways, helped clue me in to the meaning of that room that became the magazine alcove. Given my situation then, the culture around me, I can’t imagine where else I could have gotten that.

Tomorrow (it’s not yet midnight, here) will be one of most significant days in the history of the United States. And I, to my own amazement, have had no idea of the relief my heart would feel.

The fineness, the fittingness, the finally.

A fine day to you all.